Entertainment

Wanna Start Your *mail.com Service? You'll Have To Buy It From Ad Farmers

For no intelligent reason other than curiosity, after Yahoo's announcement that they'll start offering free e-mail on the ymail.com domain, I've tried out all the other *mail.com domains to see what's there.

Maybe I was naive, but I expected a lot of various e-mail services, just like Gmail and Ymail. Wrong. Huge majority are simple ad farms. cmail.com, dmail.com - yes, even email.com - all these domains contain nothing except a bunch of e-mail related links. The owners of amail.com are even lazier: the site merely displays a sign that says "It works". Thanks, guys, I'm happy to know. Actually, only three of these sites seem to offer a legitimate e-mail service: bmail.com, wmail.com and mmail.com (and I'm not sure about that last one).

It doesn't get any better as the alphabet progresses: ads, ads, and more ads. kmail.com doesn't work. Neither do nmail.com, omail.com and rmail.com. I've got to admit, I've held high hopes for xmail.com and zmail.com, but they shattered like waves on the sharp rocks of generic ads.

Once again, this reminds me of the sad reality of domaining: so many good web domains are bought by someone who set an enormous price tag on them and is now enjoying a couple of hundred dollars a month from people who stumbled onto the site by mistake. It may be free and open; it may even be fair, this Internet thing we've invented, but it sure as hell ain't perfect.

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